Greg Lavallee writes about a project currently underway at Slate, where they’ve defined a new goal for themselves:
Our goal is speed: Readers should be able to get to what they want quickly, writers should be able to swiftly publish their posts, and developers should be able to code with speed.
They’ve already started shipping a lot of neat improvements to the website but the part that really interests me is where they focus on redefining their URLs:
As a web developer and product dabbler, I love URLs. URLs say a tremendous amount about an application’s structure, and their predictability is a testament to the elegance of the systems behind them. A good URL should let you play with it and find delightful new things as you do.
Each little piece of our new URL took a significant amount of planning and effort by the Slate tech team.
The key takeaway? URLs can improve user experience. In the case of Slate, their URL structure contained redundant subdirectory paths, unnecessary bits, and inverted information. The result is something that reads more like a true hierarchy and informs the reader that there may be more goodies to discover earlier in the path.
